Crowdsourcing Brilliant Student App Ideas

The Story:

The Google Admob Student App Challenge is a crowdsourcing contest organized by Google for great app ideas. It is open to students all over the world, and bills itself as "not your average app building contest".

Participants pour their imagination and creativity into building an app (either Android or iOS) utilizing the Admob platform, which allows the apps to make money. They must also create a business plan that demonstrates how users were gained and how the project was managed.

The Inaugural Global Challenge

The first challenge took place in 2014 and received hundreds of entries from 90 countries. These were whittled down to four regional winners and one global winner. By the time they were announced to the world, their apps had already garnered more than 300,000 downloads.

The global winner was Johns Hopkins University student Phani Gaddipati's for his Stacks Flashcards. This is an electronic flashcards app that helps people create virtual flashcards and memorize things, similar in style to the old-fashioned paper flashcards. Users can also create stacks of flashcards, test themselves and analyze their performance stats.

Source of Inspiration

Gaddipati came up with the idea while sitting in his chemistry class struggling with the some of the topics. "I decided to learn Android development and write an app that would help me study," he said. He searched online to see if there was something that would help him create flashcards, and on finding nothing realized that he may have found a niche.

It took Gaddipati about a month to build the app, followed by some fine tuning during subsequent months. According to the judges of the crowdsourcing contest, the app is "a good idea in a crowded market"

The four regional winners were:

Asia Pacific Region: India 2014 Elections by a team called DV Droid. The app provides information about Indian elections going back to 1947 as well as details of the 2014 elections.

North America Region: Headphone Connect by a team called Skytrait Mobile. The app allows certain apps to be automatically launched once users put on their headphones.

Latin America Region: Match Cube by a team called Kookei Studio. A gaming app where users have to match falling cubes according to color within a time limit.

Europe, Middle East and Africa Region: High Explosive by a team called Archon Interactive. A puzzle/action game where players use the protagonist bomb to explode their way to exists.

Prizes
The regional winners won Nexus Tables, while the overall winner received a free trip to San Francisco and a visit to Google at Mountain View. The winning app was also featured on the Google Play store.